'suddenly: where we live now' at the Pomona College Museum of Art

Mia Locks

Less a theme and more a mood, uncertainty seems to be the
unlikely anchor of the nomadic group exhibition "suddenly: where we
live now" at the Pomona College Museum of Art in Claremont,
California. Curator Stephanie Snyder, director of the Douglas F.
Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College in Portland, Oregon,
begins her introductory wall text: "We don't really know what a
city is any more than we know what art is..." The point of
departure for her exhibition is an observation by German architect
and urban planner Thomas Sieverts. Author of the
book Zwischenstadt(1997), Sieverts posits a new form
of decentralized urbanity emerging worldwide, an "in-between
landscape" (in other words, sprawl) that renders conventional modes
of urban planning ever more insufficient and obsolete. His
open-ended exhortation, "New ways must be explored, which are as
yet unclear," prompted Snyder to muster seventeen young artists
whose works imagine fresh possibilities for the uncertain future of
urban landscapes.

The resulting project comprises a peripatetic museum show and
series of public events around the globe, beginning in Portland and
making stops in Mexico City, Copenhagen, Berlin, Wellington, Paris,
Miami and Sapporo, among other cities. Needless to say, "suddenly"
is an ambitious curatorial undertaking, one that is decidedly
decentralized and mutable, echoing Sieverts' call. It seeks to
embody a nontraditional exhibition structure, extending beyond the
gallery space with spontaneous public lectures, communal dinners
and citywide poster initiatives led by artist Marc Joseph Berg. An
accompanying website and blog document the events and activities
organized in conjunction with the exhibition as they transpire. For
example, the site includes a streaming MP3 of a dinner discussion
between Snyder and participating artists and writers that took
place at Clockshop, a nonprofit in Atwater Village, Los Angeles, on
the eve of the Pomona College exhibition's opening.[1]

Within the museum space Snyder maintains a pervasive textual
presence, but the ubiquity of her words is balanced by their
indeterminacy. The wall text introducing the exhibition consists of
two distinct parts entitled, respectively, "Shacking up" and "Stop
signs." In the former, Snyder observes that, "Suddenly artists are
building shacks, domes, underground dwellings, caves … aesthetic
trading posts – sites for the exchange of information and materials
on terms of our own making." But a glance to the right, mere inches
from Snyder's text, a rugged axe – a sculpture by Elias Hansen,
entitled A language I don't understand (2008) –
leans against the wall below a mark it presumably made. White paint
chips and stray bits of drywall litter the floor and cling to the
axe's blade, evidencing a literal deconstruction of the
institution. Not least, the piece serves as a visceral punctuation
mark for Snyder's strong words in "Stop signs," the second part of
her wall text: "Stop catering to the art world," she demands. "Stop
sucking up to the money/power relationships that constitute it."
This statement suggests that the artworks Snyder has selected for
"suddenly" specifically do not bow to art market
whims. Thus the axe itself functions as a "stop sign," and its
placement at the forefront of the exhibition is quite telling.

Next to the axe is a wall label that begins, "This axe is not what
it appears to be, although it is indeed a working axe." The axe's
functional capability is hard to miss, but Snyder's label
emphasizes the less obvious, process-oriented quality of the
object, informing viewers that Hansen created the axe for an
expedition into the Alaskan wilderness. "Like many of the objects
in suddenly, its natural environment lies outside of
the museum," she writes, "within the where we live
now." This suggests that Hansen's work defies art world
convention not simply by hacking into the museum's wall but, and
more importantly, by refusing the notion of artistic object as
final product and occupying the exhibition space in an unexpected
way.

Fritz Haeg, Animal Estates
5.0: Portland, Oregon, 2008. Mixed media. Pomona College Museum of
Art. Photograph: Gene Ogami It seems that most, if
not all, of the works in "suddenly" embody a similarly
process-oriented, unconventional approach, and share a likewise
indexical relationship to Snyder's textual commentary. Take Fritz
Haeg's Animal Estates (2008), a seven-city
project that seeks to reintroduce indigenous animal species back
into their respective urban environments by constructing so-called
estates for them to inhabit, using recycled, cheap and readily
accessible materials. In the main gallery at Pomona, the
estatePortland 5.0 (commissioned by Snyder for the
initial, Reed College iteration of the exhibition), forms a looming
ceiling-high wooden tower that the artist terms a
"multiple-species" dwelling or a "social housing" unit. On two
flanking walls are bulletin boards plastered with fragments and
ephemera such as maps, pamphlets, sketches, flags, pins, plaques,
posters and postcards. The flood of information spills over into a
large geodesic tent (a symbolic shack?), where viewers are invited
to sit on beanbag chairs while sifting through more textual
material, some of which chronicles the initial version of Haeg's
project, New York 1.0, produced for the 2008 Whitney
Biennial. A substantial wall label from Snyder accompanies Haeg's
surplus of supporting texts, suggesting that "suddenly" is as much
about reading as it is about viewing. She posits the work as an
attempt to "stimulate creative civic participation in the lives of
indigenous animal species," in seeming response to Sieverts' open
call for innovation. Thus Haeg's hybridized artistic, architectural
and activist practice – which foregrounds the construction of
practical but imaginative dwellings for a range of urban spaces –
proves a fitting centerpiece for Snyder's exhibition.

In the second, smaller gallery is Michael McManus's Sense
of Place (2008), an installation comprised of four
speakers – one facing in each cardinal direction – suspended from
the ceiling at ear-level. The speakers emit the voice of the
artist's mother, who describes the surroundings of Mono Lake
(located in northeastern California near Yosemite). This narration
shifts from speaker to speaker based on the viewer's movements
through the gallery space – which are captured by an overhead
surveillance camera and fed through a computer program in real-time
to a video monitor on the wall nearby – causing an evocative sense
of psychogeographical play. Rather than contextualizing the work,
Snyder's wall label offers up the advice of a curator-cum-yoga
instructor: "Take time to shift quietly through the installation,
move your body, and it will be rewarded with nuances undetectable
by the eyes, or by typical postures of listening, i.e. standing
still with head cocked and eyes closed." But while McManus's
"shack" is, at face value, more symbolic than Haeg's tangible
dwelling, it also bears a direct relationship to urban planning.
Mono Lake is "an ecosystem in peril," as Snyder rightly notes. Its
peril is due, in large part, to decreasing water levels resulting
from the Department of Water and Power’s diversion of massive
quantities of water to the growing population of Los Angeles (more
than three hundred miles away) over the years. It seems the lake is
not only a metaphor for "the fragility of perception and filial
relationships" she mentions, but perhaps also for the relationship
between water and power.

Adjacent to McManus' installation is Michael Hebb's The
Corridor Project (2009), which features video
documentation, backpacking equipment, used bowls and empty bottles
arranged on the gallery floor, as well as posters hung on the wall
detailing "the walk" – a collective journey led by the artist in
January that began at sunrise on the day of the opening at the
Pomona Museum and evidently ended with the cooking of a communal
meal. Hebb's practice involves gathering people together to dine,
and in this case the meal came after a thirty-two mile overnight
walk from Claremont through the Chino Hills to the Interstate 5
corridor. According to the artist, "This limited access roadway is
arguably the most significant physical feature and architectural
structure in the west." That Hebb's work comprises a journey
through Los Angeles County (itself the epitome of sprawl) makes it
a well-suited response to Snyder's implicit question about the
relationship between artistic practice and urban space. Like Haeg's
and Hansen's works, the items here are to be read as relics of a
discursive and itinerant practice that consciously rejects a
longstanding reification of the studio as the locus of creative
output.

In one way or another, each work in Snyder's exhibition indexes an
action or event that took place outside of the museum space.
Viewers are confronted with traces, fragments necessitating further
explanation, and Snyder provides extensive curatorial wall labels
for each work. But like her introductory wall text, these labels
traffic in self-reflexive musings, loose threads instead of
succinct facts and authoritative readings. Meaning must ultimately
be determined by the individual viewer. The uncertainty of Snyder's
voice is thus strategic, challenging the expectation of curator as
generator of meaning. Still, the ubiquitous wall labels constantly
reiterate her ambiguous voice, in effect suggesting that we "read"
the exhibition as we read her curatorial text. The exhibition
includes a publications table with a plethora of printed matter,
including the exhibition's accompanying catalogue, WHERE
WE LIVE NOW: an annotated reader.[2] Unlike a traditional
exhibition catalogue, this hefty reader, edited by Matthew Stadler,
contains no images or texts about the exhibited artworks – instead,
historical, theoretical, and literary essays and excerpts by
Sieverts, Karl Marx, Manuel Castells, Rem Koolhaas and others
engage with ideas and issues raised in the exhibition, serving a
discursive, rather than explanatory, function. It is fitting for an
exhibition that defines the "where we live now" as a pluralistic
moment of intersecting discourses that may be interpreted in
multiple ways. Snyder's exhibition raises questions about the
fixity of meaning, turning to artists who provide imaginative
alternatives to conventional urbanist thinking. By ambitiously
building a worldwide platform for their ideas – both pragmatic and
symbolic – about how we might reconsider our relationship to urban
space, Snyder proposes a constellation of meaning rather than a
fixed point on the horizon.